2024-02-26

Resiliency in ecology

  • Time required for an ecosystem to return to an equilibrium or steady-state following a perturbation (Holling 1973)
  • The capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks

Resiliency

Example of nature based solutions

  • rewildling (NBS) vs enclousure

Rewildilng Mols Bjerge National Park (cont)

Higher genetic diversity higher resilience

  • 10 generations of populations with novel stressor
  • Different levels of genetic diversity
  • Higher diversity higher resilience (Ørsted et al. 2019)

Ecological Resilience at the Landscape Level:

  • Interconnected Dynamics: Diverse ecosystems collectively respond to disturbances within landscape resilience.

  • Spatial Heterogeneity: Considers resilience distribution across landscapes, emphasizing varied spatial patterns.

  • Ecosystem Dynamics: Addresses overall configuration and interactions of interconnected ecosystems within the landscape.

On a landscape

All together

Connectivity

Higher connectivity leads to higher diversity

  • Habitat loss and fragmentation can have strong impacts on population size, genetic diversity and gene flow

(Amaral et al. 2021)

Connectivity vs Genetic diversity in europe

  • Three species of herbs through Europe (Naaf et al. 2021)
  • France, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, and Estonia

Current studies in Denmark

Grassland connectivity

Area vs diversity

Heterogeneity

Higher heterogeneity higher diversity

  • Habitat Dynamics: Impact of habitat fragmentation and eutrophication on biodiversity.

  • Mechanisms at Play: Explores the ‘rescue effect’ for rapid recolonization and the ‘drainage effect’ for stabilizing biodiversity in meta-food-webs.

  • Biodiversity Promotion: Higher biodiversity in heterogeneous landscapes, landscape heterogeneity in promoting biodiversity (Ryser et al. 2021).

Regulating populations

  • Habitat Heterogeneity: Habitat heterogeneity, allows wild ungulates to mitigate fluctuations in plant production by utilizing diverse resources throughout the year.

  • Complementarity in Vegetation Responses: Complementarity effect among different vegetation types, increasing food availability predictability across years for ungulates.

  • Livestock Influence: Dual impact of domestic ungulates, positive effects on wild ungulate density at lower abundances but negative effects at higher densities (Giralt-Rueda and Santamaría 2023).

In practice

Optimize landscapes

  • Including biodiversity, connectivity and genetic diversity (Corcoran et al. in prep)

References

Amaral, Tatiana Souza do, Juliana Silveira dos Santos, Fernanda Fraga Rosa, Marcelo Bruno Pessôa, Lázaro José Chaves, Milton Cezar Ribeiro, and Rosane Garcia Collevatti. 2021. “Agricultural Landscape Heterogeneity Matter: Responses of Neutral Genetic Diversity and Adaptive Traits in a Neotropical Savanna Tree.” Frontiers in Genetics 11 (February). https://doi.org/10.3389/fgene.2020.606222.

Giralt-Rueda, Juan Miguel, and Luis Santamaría. 2023. “Landscape Heterogeneity Increases the Stability of Wild Ungulate Populations Facing Climatic Variability in Mediterranean Ecosystems.” Science of The Total Environment 894 (October): 164826. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.164826.

Holling, Crawford S. 1973. “Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems.” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4 (1): 1–23.

Naaf, Tobias, Jannis Till Feigs, Siyu Huang, Jörg Brunet, Sara AO Cousins, Guillaume Decocq, Pieter De Frenne, et al. 2021. “Sensitivity to Habitat Fragmentation Across European Landscapes in Three Temperate Forest Herbs.” Landscape Ecology 36: 2831–48.

Ørsted, Michael, Ary Anthony Hoffmann, Elsa Sverrisdóttir, Kåre Lehmann Nielsen, and Torsten Nygaard Kristensen. 2019. “Genomic Variation Predicts Adaptive Evolutionary Responses Better Than Population Bottleneck History.” Edited by Rodney Mauricio. PLOS Genetics 15 (6): e1008205. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1008205.

Ryser, Remo, Myriam R. Hirt, Johanna Häussler, Dominique Gravel, and Ulrich Brose. 2021. “Landscape Heterogeneity Buffers Biodiversity of Simulated Meta-Food-Webs Under Global Change Through Rescue and Drainage Effects.” Nature Communications 12 (1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-24877-0.